Wrong

Orb's path to the finish line in the second leg of the Triple Crown remains uncrowded. Normandy Invasion, the fourth-place finisher in the Kentucky Derby, dropped from contention for Saturday's 138th running of the Preakness on Sunday. Trainer Chad Brown and owner Rick Porter decided to stick with their original plan and point the horse toward prestigous races for 3-year-olds later in the summer. That leaves Orb, the colt co-owned by Baltimore County resident Stuart Janney III and Ogden Mills "Dinny" Pipps' stable, with only seven confirmed challengers at this point.

Last week presented the sort of opportunity that elected officials crave. As Gov. Martin O'Malley signed the gas tax increase into law, he announced a slew of new Maryland transportation projects - $1.2 billion in all - that can now move forward to relieve congestion, make roads safer and stimulate economic development. And while all of them, from widening U.S. 29 in Howard County to designing several new light rail lines in the Washington and Baltimore areas, have their constituencies and benefits, none is likely to reap more immediate rewards than expanding MARC commuter rail operations, including allowing Penn Line trains to run on weekends.

Bob Baffert strode into the Preakness stakes barn Friday morning, shouting toward Orb's trainer Shug McGaughey loud enough so all could hear. "OK, Shug, I'm here to take away that media spotlight for you," he said. Baffert, indeed, is one of the few people in the sport who could have swiped some of the attention from McGaughey and his heavily favored colt this week . Baffert has won the Preakness five times, and on three occasions he's moved on to Belmont with a chance at the Triple Crown.

A museum of journalism in Washington, D.C., the Newseum plans to honor and include in the institution's Journalists' Memorial Mahmoud Al-Kumi and Hussam Salama. Both worked for Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV. Also, Basel Tawfiq Youssef of Syrian State TV and Maya Naser, from Iran's Press TV are set to be honored. They did not fall as reporters attempting to maintain the free flow of news. The honorees died as foot soldiers for regimes that use propaganda to sustain their repression and abuse of a free society and a free press.

What is wrong with our legal system? Freedom of speech be damned, no one has the right to protest at a private funeral ("Anger over bill to Marine's dad," March 31). This solder lost his life defending freedom, but I don't think this church, or anyone, has the right to make this time more hurtful to a family. To ask the father to pay the church's legal expenses is outrageous. Kathy Benton

I apologize for my letter, "Is Obama a liar" (Readers respond, Feb. 26). There is no reason to justify writing the piece. Just because President Obama is doing something wrong, doesn't give me the right to call him a liar. I was right in pointing out the discrepancies, but I was wrong to attack him personally. Two wrongs don't make something right. Timothy Weber, Baltimore Send letters to the editor to talkback@baltimoresun.com.

Davey Johnson dropped a Dwight Gooden on Stephen Strasburg . Scouting legend Art Stewart , who chiseled his first reports on stone tablets, upped the ante in describing Aroldis Chapman . Stewart called the lanky Cuban the "best young left-handed arm I've seen since Herb Score ," and in doing so crossed a bridge that spans 55 years, to Score's rookie season with the Indians. A few phenoms have come and gone since then. So who's better: Chapman or Strasburg?

While I disagree with Helen Thomas' recent attack on Israel and Israelis, I also disagree with those who called for her head on a pike. To silence dissent is to abandon Freedom of Speech. Richard T. Seymour, Catonsville

Scoundrels all2 Isn't there something wrong with this picture?Dorothy CrossCatonsville

The Ruins, a horror film about a Mexican vacation gone wrong, was not screened for critics.

In Washington, as in any seat of power, most acts of folly begin with hubris. Government leaders, elected or appointed, usually don't intend to do the wrong thing, to overstep or cause harm, but they become so convinced, so certain of their purpose, that they are blinded by their pride. Perhaps that's the root of the problem infecting the Justice Department, where officials secretly obtained months of telephone records of journalists working for the Associated Press. That Attorney General Eric Holder or anyone else there could find that action acceptable is frightening, to say the least.

President Barack Obama justified targeted drone assassinations outside of U.S. war zones; where was his nerve when the American consulate in Libya was under attack last year on Sept. 11 ("U.S. diplomat details attack in Benghazi," May 9)? President Obama was inexplicably MIA. No one in the press is demanding answers to that bizarre episode. Apparently, President Obama essentially abandoned our ambassador and soldiers. To add insult to injury, President Obama failed to send troops or investigators into Benghazi immediately to recover the bodies.

As the legislative chair of the Maryland Association of Housing and Redevelopment Agencies, which represents the agencies that actually administer the Section 8 rental assistance program, it was disturbing to read the distortions in Marta Mossburg's recent column ("Forcing landlords to accept vouchers won't help the poor," April 23). In addition to Ms. Mossburg's misstatements related to the Maryland HOME Act bill itself, which is merely intended to protect every person in the state as long as they have a lawful source of income, she instead focuses on whether the discrimination Section 8 voucher holders experience at the hand of landlords really makes any difference at all. Well, in my experience it does!

Of the three major news stories last week, two of them - the Boston Marathon bombing and the Texas fertilizer explosion - received extensive news coverage. But the third, the release of a report by a politically diverse group concluding there was extensive, unwarranted use of torture by our government during the Bush administration, received almost none ("The truth about torture," April 21). It is easy to understand why this received so little coverage. No deaths. No blood. Just another study.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said Wednesday she's pressing her Department of Transportation to ensure speed camera accuracy after officials acknowledged that 590 erroneous tickets were issued by the city's new multimillion-dollar camera system. At the same time, the mayor said, she's committed to a program that she believes helps protect children from drivers who speed in school zones. "I'm going to continue to put pressure on the Department of Transportation to continue to improve the program and to get it right," Rawlings-Blake said.

Local government is truly where the rubber meets the road. As Baltimore County executive, I proudly oversaw capital projects ranging from the restoration of the Randallstown Library after a fire to the expansion of Cromwell Valley Park. We rebuilt Essex Elementary School and constructed a new interchange at I-795 and Dolfield Road in Owings Mills. We were able to pay for these and dozens of other projects - which improved the everyday lives of thousands of people - with the help of tax-exempt municipal bonds.

There's nothing wrong with the Belvedere Hotel that can't be fixed by moving it to the Inner Harbor.

Tomorrow in the Today section, Sun TV critic David Zurawik examines what went wrong -- and right -- with network and cable programming during the past year.@

Both Towson University and Johns Hopkins University - via their administrations and student government associations - are on the wrong side of the inclusion and diversity issues once again, and for the very same reasons, too: intolerance of viewpoints other than their own, partisan politics, and downright stupidity. In the case of Towson University, it has done everything possible to deny a projected white student union the right to form on campus - backed by its SGA - and this flying in the face of the fact that, as it admits, two-thirds of the current student body is - you guessed it!

The Sun's April 5 editorial ("The tricky question of involuntary commitment") misses two critical points about the bill to clarify mental health civil commitment standards in Maryland, and it misstates another. The bill's key component - making explicit that a person whose mental illness prevents him from meeting his basic survival needs of food, clothing and shelter is "dangerous to self" within the meaning of the law - goes unmentioned. It is hard to imagine a reasonable argument why such an individual would not need hospital care.